Albert Robida's 'Le Vingtième Siècle' Flying Automobiles Over Future Paris c.1890
A elegantly dressed gentleman stands at the helm of a sleek, gold torpedo-shaped flying vehicle adorned with a six-pointed star, tipping his hat to a crowd of fashionably attired women on an ornate Art Nouveau aerial platform. All around, the sky teems with diverse flying machines — personal aerocars, military craft, and elegant passenger vessels — while a fantastical futuristic cityscape sprawls far below. This richly chromolithographed vision of bourgeois life in the aerial age captures Robida's signature satirical wit and obsessive retrofuturist world-building.
Robida's vision is staggeringly ambitious — an entire aerial civilization rendered in meticulous, satirical detail across a single image. The density of invention, from personal aerocars to military craft to floating social promenades, represents one of the most complete retrofuturist world-visions produced in the 19th century.
